All in a daze work.

April 16, 2006

Be yourself.

In its broad strokes, Robert Wilson's production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt -- which was staged this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House, and which I caught on Saturday night -- was characteristic of everything I knew and had seen of Wilson's previous work. Originally created for the National Theatre of Bergen and the Norwegian Theatre of Oslo, the production was performed here in Norwegian with English surtitles. Wilson's stage pictures were beautiful in their abstracted approximations of representational figures, and frequently unsettling. His scenes, as always, were beautifully lit; Wilson seems able to create a subtle radiance that surpasses any other lighting effect I've ever seen. And as usual, movement and diction were stylized to unusual extremes. ("If everyone onstage looks like a vampire and acts like a sleepwalker," Charles Isherwood wrote with some evident snark in his New York Timesreview, "Mr. Wilson is probably in charge.")

What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer whimsy that constantly worked its way into Wilson's conception, certainly during the first half of the drama (which altogether ran just shy of four hours in length, with a single intermission). Ibsen's picaresque verse commands such treatment, but this was the first time I'd seen a Wilson piece so punctuated by trots and leaps, wagging tongues and outbursts of freaky laughter. The gamboling of the young Gynt (Henrik Rafaelsen) and Åse, his put-upon mother (Wenche Medbøe), during the opening scene set a playful tone that continued through the country wedding at which Gynt first meets the sweet young Solveig (Kjersti Sandal), and even into the macabre scene in the hall of the trolls.

Much of the second half was sober by comparison, although the scenes in Anitra's harem and the Cairo madhouse had their giddier moments. As a mature Gynt -- first an unscrupulous merchant and later a would-be prophet -- Endre Hellestveit lacked the boyish charisma that Rafaelsen had brought to the first half (and was also plagued by microphone problems on Saturday night). Depictions of Gynt's sea voyage and shipwreck, staged with minimal means, were both utterly masterful. The final stretch of the drama, in which the elderly Gynt (Sverre Bentsen) compared his life to the layers of an onion, then attempted to prove himself worthy of a fate more elevated than to be melted down among the other undistinguished souls claimed by the eerie Button-Moulder (Paul-Ottar Haga, as a character that suggested Riff Raff in a Rocky Horror Show helmed by Ingmar Bergman), delved into altogether deeper philosophical and spiritual waters; Wilson's staging accordingly grew ever more stark.

Not a note of Edvard Grieg's famous score was heard tonight, but music was omnipresent -- not only in the characteristic sense of singers and instrumentalists, though these played no small part, but also through the teeming environment of sonic incidents in which Wilson and composer Michael Galasso immersed the audience. Wilson's manipulation of speech (through elongated vowels, especially) and deployment of sound effects seemed considerations as musical as they were dramaturgical.

The song Galasso supplied for Solveig, finely spun by Sandal, had the effect of a shaft of pure white light that cut through Wilson's rosy dawns and opalescent twilights alike. His beautiful score, a shimmering tapestry of resonant string timbres (violin and cello, as well as tar, theorbo, rustic fiddle and kantele) and charming folk-dance rhythms, begged to be heard on its own. ECM, if you please?